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It was written that, “Job growth surged last month as retailers, builders, health care providers and other employers expanded their payrolls, suggesting that businesses remained upbeat about the economy's future strength despite its recent softness. The nation's unemployment rate held steady at 5.2 percent in April as employers hired 274,000 additional workers, the Labor Department reported Friday, while also boosting its job counts for February and March. Employers have added an average 211,000 jobs a month this year, a pace that should bring the jobless rate down over time, and a pickup from the average last year of 183,000 a month.” We Must Understand, that the preceding text is an excerpt from a May 7, 2005 Washington Post article (“Employers quicken creation of jogs: Upbeat report says 274, 000 added to payrolls”), that had very little to do with Black Americans. Surely, that should be good news for America in general. In addition, since the double-digit unemployment rate in Black America has been African American News & Issues’ focus for the past seven years, we should welcome the “Upbeat report.” Unfortunately, although we would love to perceive such good news without suspicion, we simply can’t get a haunting little childhood rap that lamented, “If you’re White, you’re alright. If you’re Brown you can stick around. But if you’re Black get back.” Perhaps, there are many upward mobile, gainfully employed African Americans who will quickly say, “That was then, but things are much better (for those of us striving for excellence) now.”
We Must Understand, we definitely are not a monolithic people who all think, act, or even worship alike, but when one looks at the resources chart that accompanied the article, he or she would have to be in denial to not realize that Blacks are still the last hired and first fired, therefore that little “Black get back” ditty is exactly what time it is in 21st century America. We will concede, however, that things are much, much better for us today, than it was before Pres. Bill Clinton signed Presidential Order 1960 and Pres. Richard Nixon added teeth to it my creating laws that forced corporate America to make an affirmative action to put more Black faces in their once lily-white work places.
In fact, it certainly got better (for those of us who weren’t allowed to drink out of certain water fountains, or use the restroom in stores where we spent our hard earned money), when Pres. Lyndon Baines Johnson made the Civil Rights Act the law of the land with one stroke of his pen in 1964. On the other hand, a patient in critical, but stable condition... is much, much better than one surviving on a life support system. Denial notwithstanding, we would love to believe the report that, “With job growth strong, Fed officials have turned their attention to the question of whether rising labor costs — including both wages and benefits — will fuel more inflation. The April payroll gains were widespread across industries, with increases reported in finance, real estate, trucking, telecommunications, construction, and the movie and recording industries. Manufacturers, airlines, publishers, gas stations and the federal government were among the employers who cut jobs,” but (from a common sense Black perspective), we simply can’t ignore the resource report that reveals: “White unemployment: unchanged at 4.4; Black unemployment: 10.4 percent, up from 10.3 percent in March; Latino unemployment: 6.4 percent, up from 5.7 percent. Can you?
We Must Understand, that even the whitewashed statistic (which ignores staggering unemployment rates as high as 60 percent among Black ex-felons; high school dropouts and even those with “bad attitudes) translates to, “If you’re White, you’re all right. If you’re Brown, you stick around. But if you’re Black get back!”